Mitch Wagner

Kevin Mims makes the case that Shatner is a superb actor, and his much-parodied over-the-top style was due to a couple of factors: TVs at the time had small screens and often lousy picture and audio quality; performances had to be big because the medium was small. Also, Kirk and Spock were a duo; Kirk had to be loud to offset Spock’s stillness.

[quillette.com]:

While a lot of TV actors were trying to mimic the mush-mouthed vocal delivery of big-screen movie stars like Marlon Brando or James Dean, Shatner went in the opposite direction. He enunciated his words carefully and broke his sentences into bite-sized pieces, making each clause a separate unit of delivery. He would speed up his cadence at times, and then bring it to a near halt. Shatner’s unique speaking style has been parodied countless times. Among living actors, probably only Christopher Walken’s line delivery has generated more parodies.

Also:

It isn’t just a coincidence that names like Richard Matheson, Harlan Ellison, and Rod Serling crop up frequently in discussions of Shatner’s career. Academics frequently celebrate the work of various American literary schools–the American ex-pats of the so-called Lost Generation, the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, the Beats–but few literary salons have influenced American popular culture as profoundly as the Southern California fantasists who were all brought together by Rod Serling for his Twilight Zone series and later worked on other fantasy and sci-fi shows, including Star Trek.

Noah Smith [noahpinion.blog]:

Vinge was perhaps the most technologically visionary sci-fi writer of the past 50 years — a worthy successor to H.G. Wells and Isaac Asimov. And yet in some ways he excelled even those august predecessors. Vinge imbues his characters with an emotional depth that very few sci-fi authors can match, and his plots are consistently complex and engaging. He’s the rare writer who really could do it all.

In the early part of his career, Vinge was a staunch libertarian, but over time he came to see that government is essential to keeping society functioning and preserving freedom.

I used to enjoy doing panels at science fiction conventions. Fear of public speaking is supposedly the most common fear, but not for me. I’m the opposite. I love public speaking, though I rarely get opportunities. So, for a few years, I leveraged my meager cred as a tech reporter to get myself put on panels at science fiction conventions. Those panels often focused on AI, and Vernor Vinge was often a speaker at those, too.

One panel turned out to be just me and him. It was the last panel of the day on the last day of the con, and yet the room was packed. “All these people here to see me, I said. “Poor Vernor. Gosh, I hope he doesn’t feel bad.” jkjkjk They were there to see him. We sensibly turned it into a Q&A with Vernor, with me asking a lot of questions and trying to minimize my contributing my own opinions. Which is hard for me, because I have so many opinions and would feel selfish if I did not share them promiscuously.

I did another panel with about a half-dozen people, including Vernor, David Brin, a renowned physicist who has done groundbreaking research into AI, and me. Again, I realized that the people in the room were not there to see me. How can I contribute? I said to myself. And I answered myself: A panel is a show. Every show needs a villain. So when it was my turn to present, I took my iPhone out of my pocket, held it up for the audience to see, and said, “This is my iPhone. It doesn’t know who I am when my finger is wet. You’re telling me this thing is going to achieve superintelligence in a few years? Pfui. The Singularity is bullshit.”

Vernor, who was sitting next to me, turned to me and his face lit up. He was delighted.

In the 2000s and early 2010s, I attended one or two SF conventions per year and encountered Vernor walking the floors of the dealer room, checking out what was for sale while I did the same. We’d stop and chat for 15-30 minutes. I always enjoyed our conversations, and I think he did, too—it would have been easy enough to escape if he did not. I wish I’d taken the opportunity to get to know him better.

It started off well. I put the AirPods in my ears and tried lying down in bed to see how it felt. I’m a side-sleeper. I laid on my left side. Felt good. Right side. Felt good. Used the Dark Noise app to play background noise into the AirPods. Noise cancellation worked well enough; it muffled but did not stop sound in the room.

Then the trouble started.

The AirPods Pro have a safety mechanism to prevent you from pushing them too far into your ear. As I laid in bed on my side, the weight of my head began pushing the AirPods Pro deeper. They started to beep. That woke me up—but not fully awake. Just awake enough to move my head a bit so the beeping stopped.

This seemed to repeat dozens of times until I woke up enough to get the AirPods out of my ear. I couldn’t get back to sleep so I sat up for a bit until I got tired enough and went back to bed.

If you’re a back-sleeper or belly-sleeper, sleeping with the AirPods Pro will probably work well for you.

Edward Zitron’s apocalyptic vision [wheresyoured.at]:

Every bit of excitement for this technology is based on the idea what it might do, which quickly becomes conflated with what it _could_do, allowing Altman – who is far more a marketing person than an engineer – to sell the dream of OpenAI based off of the least-specific promises since Mark Zuckerberg said we’d live in our Oculus headsets.

…

I believe that artificial intelligence has three quarters to prove itself before the apocalypse comes, and when it does, it will be that much worse, savaging the revenues of the biggest companies in tech. Once usage drops, so will the remarkable amounts of revenue that have flowed into big tech, and so will acres of data centers sit unused, the cloud equivalent of the massive overhiring we saw in post-lockdown Silicon Valley.

I fear that the result could be a far worse year for the tech industry than we saw in 2023, one where the majority of the pain hits workers rather than the ghouls who inflated this perilous bubble.